This special supplement includes eleven perspectives on “scaling what works”—what it means, what it takes to do it right, and what needs to happen to increase the impact of successful solutions to social challenges.

What would it take to provide
all children with the services
and the support they need
to stay in school and graduate?
What would it take to
break the cycle of poverty once and for all?
What would it take to bring new skills and
real opportunities to the millions of people
living and working on the fringes of today’s
economy?

These are the kinds of questions that
motivate those of us in the social sector to
get out of bed and go to work and do our jobs.
Every day, nonprofit organizations and social
entrepreneurs across the country are
doing heroic work to alleviate problems
from poverty and illiteracy to inequality.
We’re making some progress. People and
communities are getting some help.

And yet these questions still loom large
over our work. So what combination of
things needs to happen to actually solve
some of these problems once and for all?

This is what the conversation about
scale and impact in the social sector is about.
It’s about moving from local solutions that
are helping a specific population or community
to finding broader solutions to the
enormous social challenges that so many of
our communities face. It’s about lifting up
promising and proven ideas so they can have
even more impact. And it’s about changing
systems and policies on the basis of what’s
working so we can produce lasting benefits
for everybody.

In the hope of broadening the conversation
in philanthropy about scale and impact,
Grantmakers for Effective Organizations
(GEO) launched the Scaling What Works
initiative in 2010. We wrapped up the initiative
at the end of 2013, and this special
supplement in the Stanford Social Innovation
Review is our opportunity to reflect
with others on what we learned. It’s also a
chance to try to capture the excitement, the
discovery, and the debate as fresh attention
and new resources are focused on how best
to make progress on some of our most stubborn—and most urgent—social problems.

Redefining Scale

Growing impact is less about growing the size of a program or organization than it is about leveraging resources and relationships to achieve better results.

Although only a few foundations, mostly
larger ones, explicitly say that scaling up
solutions is a part of what they do, all grantmakers
want their grantees to have a greater
impact. Traditionally, this has meant supporting
grantees to replicate their programs
and grow their organizations so they can
serve more people or broaden their reach
in other ways. But GEO’s work over the last
four years has shown that there are many
ways to grow impact. Advocating for policy
change, transferring technology or skills, or
spreading a new idea or innovation all can
lead to far-reaching and lasting change. As
we heard in conversations with many grantmakers
across the country, “We’re all doing
it; we’re just using different words.”

What’s missing is a shared understanding
among nonprofits, grantmakers, and
government and corporate partners of
the varying approaches to growing impact
successfully. Making progress through
many of these approaches will require
a change in both mindset and practices.
We need to push beyond a focus on growing
individual organizations and set our
sights on the ultimate change we seek, embracing
collaborative action as a primary
means to get there.

Until recently, organizational growth
was the uniformly accepted measure of nonprofit
success. “The organization got started
in one school district in Boston and now it
is in 23 states!” This kind of growth is impressive.
Yet many of the organizations that
were wildly successful at growing through
program replication are now rethinking
and retooling their work in hopes of growing
their impact even further. The bottom
line: The most important thing we need to
scale up is not the size of an organization,
but the results it achieves. The Bridgespan
Group’s Jeff Bradach highlighted this point
exactly when he observed, “The question
now is, ‘How can we get 100× the impact
with only a 2× change in the size of the organization?’”1

Seen in this way, growing impact is less
about growing the size of a program or organization
than it is about leveraging resources
and relationships to achieve better
results: significant and sustained benefit for
people and communities. It’s about helping
nonprofits “punch above their weight”
and get outsized results compared to the
resources they have at hand.

So let’s be clear about what we mean
by scaling up. For GEO, it means “growth
in impact.” The conversation about scale is
therefore about the variety of ways in which
nonprofits and their funders are creating
more value for communities
and making fast and substantial
progress on the issues and
causes we all care about. Approaches like
catalyzing networks and supporting advocacy
hold a great deal of promise because
they offer ways to respond that are as sophisticated,
complex, and far-reaching as
the problems they seek to address.

Four Approaches to Grow Impact

How can the nonprofit sector turn this conversation
about scale into an agenda for action
that will have a significant impact on
the issues we care about? Through a major
exploration conducted in collaboration
with Ashoka, Social Impact Exchange,
Taproot Foundation, and TCC Group, GEO
sought to identify and describe the multiple
pathways to impact and to match the
pathways with specific grantmaker actions
that support each approach. We also hoped
to understand the grantmaking practices
that impede progress. To illustrate the
multiple pathways to grow impact, GEO
has adapted a framework from Julia Coffman
that originally appeared in The Evaluation
Exchange. (See “Pathways to Grow
Impact.”)

In our conversations with grantmakers
and nonprofits, we have found that it’s important
to acknowledge that innovation and
impact are not the same. Innovation for its
own sake isn’t the goal; rather, innovation is
important insofar as it enables the expansion
of social impact. Although it’s true that innovation
can lead to breakthroughs, impact can
also grow to the extent that we provide adequate
resources to spread ideas and strategies
that have existed for years. For instance,
we have known for decades the dimensions
that make mentorship powerful, particularly
the frequency and consistency of interaction.
Providing more resources to mentorship
programs that have integrated this knowledge
into their practice may not be innovative,
but it clearly helps to grow social impact.

Changing the Conversation

I periodically serve as a guest lecturer at
Northwestern University teaching undergraduate
students interested in nonprofits.
When I ask what their aspirations are for
the future, by and large they say, “I want to
start a nonprofit.” They don’t say that they
want to make sure every poor kid gets the
best possible education or that they want
to defend health care as a universal human
right. They want to found something—and
frankly, it doesn’t matter what. If we are
going to succeed in creating powerful advances,
we need to turn this aspiration and
mindset on its head.

Most high-performing nonprofits are
led by inspiring, visionary leaders. Leadership
is a vital ingredient for all efforts to
grow impact. Yet the type of leadership the
most effective social entrepreneurs are exhibiting,
and the approach that will insulate
their organizations against dependence
on a single person or idea, is collaborative
and networked. It’s what Robert Greenleaf
called “servant leadership.” Ashoka Fellows
coined the title “evangelist-in-chief”
to describe a leader who inspires others to
adopt a certain idea or approach that advances
the social change an organization
ultimately seeks.

Thorkil Sonne of Denmark is an example
of this kind of leadership. In response
to his son’s autism, Sonne founded the organization
Specialisterne to employ high-functioning
people with autism in information
technology jobs. Seeking to serve a
much larger number of people with autism
spectrum disorders, he began to spend more
time getting to know the work of related
organizations, speaking publicly and connecting
others to the work. His focus isn’t
on growing his own organization per se; it’s
on generating attention and support for the
idea that people with autism have unique
skills and can be highly successful in certain
types of jobs. Thorkil Sonne, who founded
two Danish organizations serving people
with autism spectrum disorders, recognized
the need for a leader dedicated only to
developing and managing stakeholder relations
and creating the public interest and
will to take their concepts much further. He
appointed a CEO, became chairman, and
began to concentrate on generating the attention
and support for his goal of securing
one million jobs for people with autism and
similar challenges worldwide.

As leaders in the social sector, we need to
follow Sonne’s example and change the narrative
about how to increase social impact.
The key to success is recognizing and rewarding behavior that contributes to something
bigger than any person or organization
can achieve. In the past, the questions
enterprising nonprofits struggled with may
have been What’s our growth strategy? How
many cities can we be located in five years
from now? Today the questions are shifting
to How can we amplify others’ efforts to advance
our ultimate goal? What policymakers
do we need to engage with to be successful
in the broader social change we seek?

Next Steps for Grantmakers

For grantmakers seeking to increase social
impact, it is important to remember that
philanthropy can do harm. Insisting on
open-and-shut evidence of impact or setting
unrealistic deadlines for results can
doom both a grantmaker and a grantee to
failure. Nonprofits often confront enormous
and complicated challenges that defy
easy and fast solutions. When funding nonprofits,
grantmakers should try to structure
their investments in ways that help rather
than hurt their grantees.

Regardless of one’s approach to growing
impact, the same four fundamental grantmaker
practices are crucial.

Provide flexible funding in appropriate
amounts over the long term. GEO
and others have found again and again
that nonprofits need flexible, reliable
dollars over the long term. Providing
larger grants and more general operating
and multiyear support is crucial
because it enables nonprofits to pay
for the organizational infrastructure
(staffing, systems, technology, etc.) that
they need to succeed. David Carleton,
director of Catalyst Kitchens, says
Boeing’s flexible support has been
important to his organization’s success.
“They provided funding with no strings
attached and no restrictions, just pure
support for our mission and strategy.
Not only was it critical financial support
in our start-up year, but it was a
vote of confidence that boosted morale
and momentum—and sent a positive
message to other funders.” Catalyst
Kitchens provides food-service job
training to build self-sufficiency among
participants and combat food scarcity.

Fund data and performance management capabilities. Nonprofits that
seek to grow their impact need reliable
data about what’s working, what’s
not, and how to improve continuously.
Grantmakers can help build this
capacity by investing in grantees’ data
collection and performance management
systems. As part of its efforts to
improve the lives of children in Detroit,
the Skillman Foundation is supporting
an organization whose exclusive focus
is to provide nonprofit and government
decision-makers with data and analysis
so they can make more informed
decisions. When used in the wrong
way, however, data and performance
management indicators can backfire.
Grantees sometimes are punished for
delivering worse-than-expected results
when measured against unrealistic
indicators. At other times funders and
grantees waste precious time gathering
data that do not lead to improvements.

Invest in capacity building and
leadership development that help
organizations grow impact. Many
grantmakers support nonprofit capacity
building and leadership development,
but often they do not provide the
kind of help that nonprofits require—such as the ability of individuals and
organizations to collaborate and build
relationships. Funders can help build
collaborative capacities by making connections
for grantees; giving grantees
the time, space, and special resources to
carry out collective action; and providing
general operating support as well
as dedicated leadership development
grants so they can help their staffs and
boards develop the skills they need.

Consider supporting movements as
well as organizations. Throughout
history, social movements have been
important in advancing opportunity,
well-being, and justice for all people.
Today many grantmakers are shifting
from solely supporting individual
organizations and programs to supporting
the multiple organizations and
intersecting networks that constitute
movements. This can be important and meaningful work, but it requires
grantmakers to be patient and take the
long view. The eight funders that compose
the Civil Marriage Collaborative,
a pooled fund tackling marriage equality,
had the fortitude and patience to
fight for the long term. It took 15 years
of public education and community
organizing to shift public perception
of gay marriage in the United States. Today a majority of Americans support
same-sex marriage. The collaborative
has been providing funds since 2004
and gave $1.62 million in grants in 2013
to the groups on the front lines of that
effort. (In November 2013 GEO hosted
a conference exploring grantmakers’
support of movements. For more information
on the conference, visit www.scalingwhatworks.org)

Looking Forward

Grantmakers and their grantees cannot be
expected to take on the challenge of scaling
up social solutions on their own. As always,
government action will be an important
driver of future progress. The Obama Administration
launched the Social Innovation
Fund (SIF) in 2009 as an experiment
in public-philanthropic partnership to support
the best community-based solutions.
(See “From Innovation to Results.”) Other experiments under way in the
federal government will yield more insights
about the potential for collaborative action
between governments, community organizations,
and private grantmakers.

In order to make progress, all sectors
will need to take a realistic look at their respective
roles. As the SIF began its work, it
was surprising to learn that the federal government
saw philanthropy as a place to go
to amplify its investments, and at the same
time foundations and other “intermediaries”
participating in the program saw the
federal government as a source for the same.
The reality, of course, is that private philanthropic
resources will never come close to
attaining the reach and impact of government,
especially as government resources
are redirected away from the social safety
net or other services to help the poor.

The question for philanthropy and
government alike is How can we deploy
resources to the greatest effect? This
question was the focus of a gathering for
grantmakers that GEO and the Nonprofit
Finance Fund convened in the fall of 2008.
As the first clouds of the economic crisis
were starting to appear, we had little idea
how well-timed the conference would be.
A comment at that gathering from Clara
Miller (then president and CEO of the Nonprofit
Finance Fund and now president of
the F. B. Heron Foundation) has stayed
with me. What she said, in a nutshell, was
that the biggest change that could help the
nonprofit sector operate more effectively is
for philanthropy to better coordinate how
it deploys financial resources.

Pioneers in the field understand this.
For example, grantmakers like the Edna
McConnell Clark Foundation, first through
its capital aggregation campaign and now
as an SIF intermediary, have made great
strides in generating resources closer to the
scale of the problems they are working to
solve. The SIF itself, although not without
its challenges (which have included a required
private match that was too high), has
certainly catalyzed joint funding and collaborative
work throughout the United States.

As our collective thinking has matured
and as we are able to draw from a larger
base of experience, the common thread is
the focus on growing impact rather than on
growing organizations. GEO’s vision for the
sector is one in which philanthropic leaders
can’t imagine making strategic decisions in
isolation. It’s a sector where grantees aren’t
compelled to adopt a grantmaker’s measures
of impact but rather are supported to
identify and track the measures that make
the most sense for them. In this future,
grantmakers and nonprofits work in concert
through wide-ranging networks, and
the watchwords for philanthropy are flexibility,
collaboration, and respect.

What will it take to achieve the wide-ranging
changes we all want to see happen
in our communities and our country? After
four years of work alongside many of the
pioneers in philanthropy and social change
at all levels, GEO is confident we’ve landed
on one thing it takes. It takes grantmakers
who are committed to working with nonprofits
to ensure that they have everything
they need to grow their impact over time.

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tremendous response—both affirmations of the work they do, and helpful suggestions for improvements. Over the past few years, they have realized a significant return on investment by implementing client feedback into their model. Learn more in this audio slideshow featuring Alexa Cares, NFP’s feedback manager. (Part of a series produced for SSIR with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation) #feedbackempowers https://ssir.org/videos/entry/integrating_feedback_across_a_nonprofit_business_model

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